Phantom (24 page)

For two long seconds the computer’s fan was all that could be heard. Then she suddenly straightened up. Sent Harry an absentminded,
far-off look and placed her hands against her cheeks as if to cool them down. Then she turned and left.

Harry leaned back, closed his eyes and cursed softly. Heard her clattering about in the kitchen. Breathed in a couple of times. Decided that what had just happened had not happened. Tried to collect his thoughts. Then he went on.

He Googled the remaining names. Some came up with ten-year-old results of skiing competitions or a report of a family get-together, others not even that. They were people who no longer existed, who had been withdrawn from modern society’s almost all-embracing floodlights, who had found shady nooks where they sat waiting for the next dose or else nothing.

Harry sat looking at the wall, at a poster of a guy with plumage on his head.
JÓNSI
was written underneath. Harry had a vague memory that it had something to do with the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. Ethereal sounds and relentless falsetto singing. Quite a long way from Megadeth and Slayer. But of course Oleg may have changed his taste. Or have been influenced. Harry settled back with his hands behind his head.

Irene Hanssen.

He had been surprised by the list of calls. Gusto and Irene had spoken on the phone almost every day, then abruptly stopped. After that he hadn’t even tried to call her. As if they had had a falling-out. Or maybe Gusto had known that Irene could not be reached by phone. But then, a few hours before he was shot, Gusto had called the landline at her home address. And had got an answer. The conversation had lasted one minute and twelve seconds. Why did he think that was odd? Harry tried to unravel his way back to where the thought had originated. But had to give up. He dialed the landline. No answer. Tried Irene’s cell. A voice told him that the account was temporarily blocked. Unpaid bills.

Money.

It started and ended with money. Drugs always did. Harry tried to remember the name Beate had told him. The pilot who had been arrested with powder in his hand luggage. The police memory still worked. He typed
TORD SCHULTZ
into directory assistance.

A cell number came up.

Harry opened a drawer in Oleg’s desk to find a pen. He lifted
Masterful Magazine
and his eye fell on a newspaper clipping in a plastic folder. He immediately recognized his own, younger face. He took out the folder and flipped through the other clippings. They were all of
cases Harry had worked on and where Harry’s name had been mentioned or his picture appeared. There was also an old interview in a psychology journal where he had answered—not without some irritation, he seemed to remember—questions about serial killings. Harry closed the drawer. Cast around. He felt a need to smash something. Then he switched off the computer, packed the little suitcase, went into the hall and put on his suit jacket. Rakel came out. She brushed an invisible speck of dust from his lapel.

“It’s so strange,” she said. “I hadn’t seen you for ages, I had just begun to forget you, and then, here you are again.”

“Yes,” he said. “Is that a good thing?”

A fleeting smile. “I don’t know. It’s both good and bad. Do you understand?”

Harry nodded and pulled her to him.

“You’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said. “And the best. Even now, merely by being here, you can make me forget everything else. No, I’m not sure that’s good.”

“I know.”

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the suitcase.

“I’m checking into Hotel Leon.”

“But—”

“We’ll talk tomorrow. Good night, Rakel.”

Harry kissed her on the forehead, opened the door and went out into the warm autumn evening.

T
HE BOY IN
reception said he didn’t need to fill in another registration form and offered Harry the same room as last time, 301. Harry said that was fine so long as they fixed the broken curtain pole.

“Is it broken again?” the boy said. “It was the previous lodger. He had a temper, I’m afraid.” He passed Harry the room key. “He was a policeman as well.”

“Lodger?”

“Yes, he was one of the permanent ones. An agent, ‘undercover,’ as you call him.”

“Mm. Sounds like his cover wasn’t worth much, if
you
knew.”

The boy smiled. “Let me go and see if I have a curtain pole in the storeroom.” The boy left.

“Beret Man was very like you,” a deep Swedish voice said. Harry turned.

Cato was sitting in a chair in what with a little charity could be
termed the lobby. He looked drawn and was slowly shaking his head. “Very like you, Harry. Very passionate. Very patient. Very obstinate. Unfortunately. Not as tall as you, of course, and he had gray eyes. But the same police look about them, and just as lonely. And he died in the same place as you will. You should have gone, Harry. You should have caught the plane.” He gesticulated something incomprehensible with his long fingers. His expression was so mournful that for a moment Harry wondered if the old man was going to cry. He staggered to his feet as Harry turned to the boy.

“Is what he says true?”

“What who says?” the boy asked.

“Him,” Harry said, turning to point at Cato. But he was already gone. He must have flitted into the darkness by the stairs.

“Did the undercover cop die here, in my room?”

The boy stared at Harry before answering. “No, he went missing. He washed ashore by the Opera House. Afraid I don’t have a curtain pole, but what about this nylon line? You can thread it through the curtains and tie it to the pole attachments.”

Harry nodded slowly.

I
T WAS TWO O’CLOCK
in the morning. Harry was still awake and on his last cigarette. On the floor lay the curtains and the thin nylon line. He could see a woman on the other side of the yard; she was dancing a soundless waltz, without a partner. Harry listened to the sounds of the town and watched the smoke curling up toward the ceiling. Studied the winding routes it took, the apparently random figures it made, and tried to see a pattern in it.

It took two months after the meeting between the old man and Isabelle for the cleanup to begin
.

The first ones to be busted were the Vietnamese. The newspapers said the cops had struck in nine places simultaneously, found five heroin stores and arrested thirty-six Vietcong. The week after it was the Kosovar Albanians’ turn. The cops used elite Delta forces to raid a flat in Helsfyr that the Gypsy chief thought no one knew about. Then it was the North Africans and Lithuanians. The guy who was head of Orgkrim, a good-looking model-type with long eyelashes, said in the papers they had been tipped off anonymously. Over the next few weeks street sellers, everyone from coal-black Somalis to milky-white Norwegians, were busted and imprisoned. But not a single one of us wearing an Arsenal shirt. It was already clear that we had more elbow room and the lines were getting longer. The old man was recruiting some of the unemployed street sellers, but keeping his end of the bargain: Heroin dealing had become less visible in downtown Oslo. We cut down on heroin imports because we earned so much more on violin. Violin was expensive, so some junkies tried to switch to morphine, but they always came back
.

We were selling it faster than Ibsen could make it
.

One Tuesday we ran out at half past twelve, and since cells were strictly forbidden—the old man thought Oslo was fricking Baltimore—I went down to the station and called the Russian Gresso phone from one of the phone booths. Andrey said he was busy, but he would see what he could do. Oleg, Irene and I sat on the steps on Skippergata waving away customers and chilling. An hour later I saw a figure come limping toward us. It was Ibsen himself. He was furious. Yelling and cursing. Until he caught sight of Irene. Then it was as if the storm were over. He followed us to the backyard, where he handed over a plastic bag filled with a hundred packages
.

“Twenty thousand,” he said, holding out his paw. “This is cash on delivery.” I took him aside and said that next time we ran out we could go to his place
.

“I don’t want visitors,” he said
.

“I might pay more than two hundred a bag,” I said
.

He eyed me with suspicion. “Are you planning to start up on your own? What would your boss say to that?”

“This is between you and me,” I said. “We’re talking chicken feed. Ten to twenty bags for friends and acquaintances.”

He burst out laughing
.

“I’ll bring the girl,” I said. “Her name’s Irene, by the way.”

He stopped laughing. Looked at me. Tried to laugh again, but couldn’t. And now everything was written in big letters in his eyes. Loneliness. Greed. Hatred. And desire. Fricking desire
.

“Friday evening,” he said. “At eight. Does she drink gin?”

I nodded. From now on she did
.

He gave me the address
.

Two days later the old man invited me to lunch. For a second I thought Ibsen had snitched on me, because I could remember his expression. We were served by Peter and sat at the long table in the cold dining room while the old man told me he had cut out heroin imports across the country and from Amsterdam and now only imported from Bangkok via a couple of pilots. He talked about the figures, checked that I understood and repeated the usual question: Was I keeping away from violin? He sat there in the semi-gloom gazing at me, then he called Peter and told him to drive me home. In the car I considered asking Peter whether the old man was impotent
.

Ibsen lived in a typical bachelor pad in a building on Ekeberg. Big plasma screen, little fridge and nothing on the walls. He poured us a cheap gin with lifeless tonic, without a slice of lemon, but with three ice cubes. Irene watched the performance. Smiled, was sweet, and left the talking to me. Ibsen sat with an idiotic grin on his face, gawping at Irene, though he did manage to close his gob whenever saliva threatened to leak out. He played fricking classical music. I got my packages and we agreed I would drop by again in two weeks. With Irene
.

Then came the first report about the falling number of ODs. What they didn’t write was that first-time users of violin, after only a few weeks, were lining up with staring eyes and visible fits of the shakes from withdrawal symptoms. And as they stood there with their crinkled hundred-krone notes and found out that the price had gone up again, they cried
.

After our third visit to Ibsen he took me aside and said that next time he wanted Irene to come alone. I said that was fine, but then I
wanted fifty packages and the price was a hundred kroner apiece. He nodded
.

It wasn’t easy to talk Irene into it, and for once the old tricks didn’t work. I had to be hard. Explain this was my chance. Our chance. Ask if she wanted to stay sleeping on a mattress in a rehearsal room. And in the end she mumbled that she didn’t. But she didn’t want to … And I said she didn’t have to, she should just be nice to the lonely old man—he probably didn’t have much fun with that foot of his. She nodded and said I had to promise not to tell Oleg. After she left for Ibsen’s pad I felt so down I diluted a bag of violin and smoked what was left in a cigarette. I woke up to someone shaking me. She stood over my mattress crying so much the tears were running down onto my face and making my eyes sting. Ibsen had made a move, but she had gotten away
.

“Did you get the packages?” I asked
.

That was obviously the wrong question. She broke down completely. So I said I had something to make everything all right again. I fixed up a syringe and she stared at me with big, wet eyes as I found a blue vein in her fine, white skin and inserted the needle. I felt the spasms transplant themselves from her body to mine as I pressed the plunger. Her mouth opened in a silent orgasm. Then the ecstasy drew a bright curtain in front of her eyes
.

Ibsen might be a dirty old man, but he knew his chemistry
.

I also knew that I had lost Irene. I could see it in her face when I asked about the packages. It could never be the same. That night I saw Irene glide into blissful oblivion along with my chances of becoming a millionaire
.

The old man continued to make millions. But still he wanted more, faster. It was like there was something he had to catch, a debt that was due soon. He didn’t seem to need the money; the house was the same, the limo was washed but not changed and the staff stayed at two: Andrey and Peter. We still had one competitor—Los Lobos—and they’d also extended their street-selling operations. They hired the Vietnamese and Moroccans who weren’t already in jail, and they sold violin not only downtown but also at Kongsvinger, in Tromsø, Trondheim and—so the rumor went—Helsinki. Odin may have earned more than the old man, but the two of them shared the market, there were no fights for territory, they were both getting very rich. Any businessman with his brain fully connected would have been happy with the status fricking quo
.